Gary Matthews Jr. is about to find out how miserable a man can be while earning $10 million a year to play for his hometown ballclub with a chance to win.

Because, while the Angels can win this season, their new center fielder cannot.

Not anymore. Not since his name has been linked to steroids. My goodness, it’s just about the juiciest baseball-name-to-

scandal linking we’ve had around here all week.

Here’s a guy who went to Tempe, Ariz., for spring training already a marked man with Anaheim fans after parlaying his first big season in an eight-year career into an outrageous $50 million contract with the Angels.

He still had a chance to shake the target off his back starting in April if somehow, despite moving from batter-friendly Texas to pitcher-pal Angel Stadium, he matched last season’s personal-best .313 and turned into the extra power hitter the Angels need and made SportsCenter catches every night.

Now, though, thanks to a report in an Albany, N.Y., newspaper, the challenge has grown more complicated for the Granada Hills High graduate whose famous father starred at San Fernando High. A lot more complicated. OK, impossible.

The Albany Times Union said Matthews, Jose Canseco and former heavyweight champion Evander Holyfield are included on customer lists for a Mobile, Ala., pharmaceutical company whose owners have been indicted in New York over the distribution of human growth hormone.

After this, if Matthews looks like 10 million bucks on the field, he earns his salary and maybe saves the scalp of Angels general manager Bill Stoneman.

But skeptics will look at his post-30 career upswing as evidence he was, is and will have to remain a chemical cheater.

On the other hand, if Matthews reverts to a .275hitter, he’s a heel coming and going. He not only will have held up the Angels for a salary comparable to those of slightly more accomplished free agents Nomar Garciaparra, Juan Pierre, Tom Glavine, Greg Maddux and Frank Thomas; he will have held up his new team and its confounding GM under false pretenses, his inexplicable improvement in 2006 suddenly quite explicable as a one-time surge powered by the juice.

There’s only one way this doesn’t get nasty, producing 81 nights of boos for Matthews and six months of angry letters for Stoneman. That’s if the Alabama company in question comes up with an innocent explanation for Matthews’ name showing up on that illicit list (the innocent-until- proven-guilty truisms have lost their traction as the Steroids Era goes on).

I’m not in Tempe, I’m in Los Angeles. I’m told the joke in Angels camp was that when Matthews met with the club brass to talk about the drug report, his first question was, “My contract’s guaranteed, right?”

Matthews did join a crisis meeting Wednesday morning with Stoneman, owner Arte Moreno, manager Mike Scioscia and communications VP Tim Mead. Matthews impressed Moreno by leading off with an apology for being a distraction to the team.

The bosses apparently didn’t ask Matthews to confirm or deny the reported link to drugs, and Stoneman wouldn’t say if the 32-year-old’s new contract addresses a case like this. So it’s hard to say what the front office can do if it’s demonstrated that it shelled out its biggest bucks of the winter for silicone stats.

Probably not much. Matthews hasn’t been caught by baseball’s drug-testing program, and the players’ union would get involved at some point.

Matthews told writers he expects the situation “to resolve itself here in the near future.” Little Sarge had better know something that the rest of us don’t.

Angels fans hope he does. Except for those who willbe rooting for the $10million-a-year man to fail and confirm their doubts.

Gary Matthews Jr. went to spring training under pressure and is likely to leave it under suspicion. The season opener is a month away, and he’s already grounded into a double play.

Kevin Modesti is a reporter for the Los Angeles Daily News and the Southern California News Group, covering the political scene in Los Angeles County. An L.A. native, he was a sports writer, columnist and editor for most of his career, and later an editorial board member, writer and editor in the Opinion section. He lives in the San Fernando Valley and is based in the Woodland Hills office.